I tried to be honest very early on with everyone around that I wanted to pursue a book project. I think the tangibility of what an image is and who owns it is very tricky. My book is the sixth one published and I am the first African-American to win the prize. I won the Honickman First Book Prize in Photography from Duke University. Many of the stars of Paris Is Burning were asking, “Did we get enough money?” I was happy to tell the people that I was shooting how much I was getting for the book. There were a lot of trust issues with Jenny Livingston at the time. Did you face any of the effects of that backlash being that you were coming behind the movie, only a few years later? She has said in interviews that it's not ethical as a journalist to pay your subjects for participation in a documentary and she did eventually provide a nominal sum for the group of the film’s principals to split. Jennie Livingston was accused of having established a film career on the lives of her subjects without any of them achieving the same level of success. Then the real pictures started happening. Andre Mizrahi, Hector Extravaganza, RR Chanel and Derek Ebony all co-signed me. When I became more open, the community became more open with me and allowed me in. I had to deal with that idea and become comfortable in my own skin. I was only three years into documenting the balls at the time and I was concerned that people seeing the pictures -without knowing me personally - would assume that I was gay. I was getting hit on and I did not know how to deal with that. You needed to become comfortable being around same-gender loving people. When I started to open myself up, it was then that I created pictures that were worthy of being in the book. Plus, I was not completely open with the scene and how I felt about it. I was 19 years old, very nervous, and still learning photography and not knowing how to document or how to be a documentary photographer. When I first started, I was only photographing the backs of heads.
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